I still keep up with magic. Multiple teams broke the format with Eldrazi. General consensus is the UR deck is probably better than the colorless one — at least in the mirror — and the results seemed to agree. I doubt twin would have really made a difference either way, given how fast and disruptive the eldrazi deck is.

I'm 50/50 on wotc having some idea this was coming, although not in this magnitude, given Eldrazi Temple was printed in MM2 / the Duel Deck and Eye of Ugin was printed in MM2 and as an Expedition. Although both might have just been flavor prints.

Regardless, getting to play 8 Ancient Tomb in Modern turns out to be fairly broken. I don't have the source, but CFB said their team went something like 90% win rate day one with the deck, which is just completely bonkers in any format, let alone one that is usually seen as such a coinflip like Modern. The deck put 6 of 32 players into the top 8. Or to put it another way, 8% of the field were eldrazi decks (32 of 391), while 75% of the top 8 were eldrazi. That's an insane level of dominance. LSV says Eldrazi is the second-best deck he's ever played at a Pro Tour (behind Caw Blade), while in the same breath admitting that — by the numbers — Eldrazi was even better, putting half of his 20 player team into the Top 32.

WotC got their wish of a shaken up PT, although it looks like they broke modern in the process.

They may have broken the format, but either way it isn't a format I think I'd be especially excited to be playing. Without Twin we have a meta game of very linear fast decks, and that's not especially great whether or not Eldrazi turned out to be the best of that variety.

Just read Ragnoros' post. So, on the topic of LSV and Caw-Blade. Caw-Blade was a complicated machine. It was hard to play. It was hard enough to play that rogue decks could still, out of nowhere, beat the ever loving shit out of it. It was incredibly consistent against a known field, and terrible against an unknown field.

Caw-Blade is great for a Pro-Tour, the number of brewers with the confidence to take a "new" deck ot a pro-tour is low. It's a % that doesn't even register as relevant.

Meanwhile, back in Houston, during Caw-Blade season, my friends and I brewed up a white stacks deck that had like a 100% winrate against Caw-Blade (deck literally didn't know what to do against Lodestone Golem). Unfortunately, Prime Time was still relevant and that was the deck's weak matchup. Anyway, we both petered out right before the top 8 simply by running into Primeval.

Eldrazi would crush that Stacks deck. It wouldn't even pay attention to it. Colorless decks are evil in every format and I don't know why Wizards keeps letting them happen. They are nearly universally the most degenerate and oppressive decks ever made. Dredge didn't care about color, Monobrown and stacks don't care about color, 43 lands had color as a byproduct of where the good spells were, sometimes all 5 colors and casting things was irrelevant, Affinity, Flash Hulk. Just. Yeah. Fuck decks that don't care about color (even if I love playing them).

Note: I think I have all my timelines correct here, maybe. This was a while ago.

Not only did Wizards "let" it happen, they specifically printed a bunch of amazing colorless stuff. I think they added the "colorless" mana type as a thing to try and make it a little restrictive, but that only matters in standard where they aren't a billion amazing lands that produce colorless mana as their "downside."